Microsoft teams with ESPN to bring Halo championship to X-Games Aspen

Microsoft's Xbox division will be teaming up with ESPN to bring the Halo World Championship to the 2016 X-Games Aspen. Segments of the esports tournament will be broadcast as part of the wider ESPN X-Games telecast from January 28-31.

The Halo World Championship will feature eight of the world's top esports teams playing in a single-elimination bracket-style tournament. Winners will receive X-Games medals and $30,000 in prize money. Microsoft does stress that the X-Games Halo invitational results will not impact the wider rankings or contribute points to the championship's regional finals.

The Halo competition will last three days. In addition to being broadcast live on ESPN, the tournament will also be live-streamed on WatchESPN, Twitch.tv/Halo and mlg.tv/halo.

This is promising news. It means that Microsoft is actually going to put in the effort and capital needed to bring the attention to Halo 5 that it deserves. It's multiplayer gameplay mechanics are the best ever in the series, and arguably the best of any FPS ever. Yet, thanks to the biased gaming media, it did not get anywhere near the recognition that it deserved last year (and still now). Microsoft can counteract this by making it the FPS in the esports world. They're on track to doing that with the $2 million (and growing) price pool and with this Xgames promotion. Now, they just need to do the same thing with Killer Instinct, which is a superb 2D fighter that also deserves more recognition for its brilliant gameplay.

Luckily, those are all things they can tweak and add over time. They definitely need a lot more maps. Some of them are very good (1. Plaza, 2. Coliseum, 3. Empire), but some are not, especially when they are just knockoffs of other maps (looking at you, Eden and Overgrowth).

The problem is, they don't seem interested in doing that. Warzone is still a foundationally decent mode that they have shown 0 willingness to improve, even though its intricacies (boss spawns, in particular) completely ruin any fun related to it. They pulled Orion, one of my favorite maps, citing imbalance. However, they allow Fathom, quite likely the worst multiplayer map in franchise history, to stay. Weapon balance hasn't been tweaked once in the few months since launch, I don't think, leaving frag grenades to be a complete joke that turn the game more into a crapshoot than a shooter.

Things could be tweaked, it just seems that they're happy with coating decent in disaster. I haven't played the game much because the matchmaking is horrid, throwing me with total bums. If I don't go into the game with at least one friend, there's almost no hope, because the randoms can be SO BAD. The ranking system is really bad. Allowing people to quit with no actual repurcussions, then not replaceing them, THEN making the only source of ranking the win percentage that others can utterly destroy, I don't see the point. Oh, and Warzone's the arcade mode, there's no competitive balance, and it's extremely common to see matches end 1000-300, or something of that kind. Why? The vast majority of scoring comes from random luck with Legendary Bosses.

3 months, and none of the core problems have been improved in any way. I struggle to see improvement when none has come so far. It seems pumping out cards and DLC is the goal, while core failures are left as core components.

It's all on the commentators. Last season's HCS, which focused on Halo 2 Anniversary, was quite good. The commentators did a good job of explaining what was going on, explaining potential strategy, evaluating players' actions and tactics, etc. The hardest part of televising games like Halo is that the camera can only show one player at a time. They try to counteract this by using spectator outlines (which helps a bit), which is much better than trying to split-screen it.

They also do a great job televising Killer Instinct. With that game, you lose the problem of only showing one player instead of all of them, and with some excellent commentators, they can really make it exciting.